The Carmina Burana: Songs from Benediktbeuern

The Carmina Burana, or Songs from Benediktbeuern, the name of the monastery in Bavaria where the thirteenth-century manuscript was discovered in 1803, is a seminal work of the Middle Ages, exposing an often unseen facet of the medieval ethos through the eyes of a vast array of writers. From monks, lawyers, clerics, scholars, bishops, and theologians, to drunkards, poets, students, gamblers, madmen, and wasting lovers, this unique corpus captures their thoughts over the course of three hundred years. Religious hypocrisy, courtly love, venal courts where verdicts are for sale, hope and despondency in love and life, eschatology that explores the end in sight, prodigals' remorse over past sins, advice to clerics who transgress Church laws, pastorals about shepherds' rustic enterprises, secret affairs hidden from public sight, a forlorn Cupid lamenting the state of the times, lessons from the delusive magicians of love, a heated debate between wine and water, a self-deprecating Gamblers' High Mass, odes to fallen kings and saints, Queen Hecuba's grief over Troy's fallen state, Trojan Aeneas and Dido's deadly affair, songs from the taverns and fateful gambling boards, panegyrics on valiant Crusaders at war, and tongue-in-cheek pleas from starving poets who will write verse for food are among the pantheon of topics that comprise this unique collection of songs.

This third edition marks the third printing of the very first complete English translation of the Carmina Burana. This updated edition features:

• A revised translation.
• A new introduction that outlines the history of the manuscript.
• An expanded commentary with several additional entries that explore the text's historical and mythological figures and events, exotic grammatical constructions, alternate translations, source material for the poems, and the meanings behind some of the more inscrutable poems in the corpus.
• An Authors' Index that provides biographical data on each of the known authors of the poems in the corpus.

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